SYMBOLIST POETS

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended
the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states
of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created
by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through
the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions,
notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of
the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created
by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed
as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a
state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets
focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They
wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged
his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created
his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary,
before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced
wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended
to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his
art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were
introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images.
Metonymy replaced metaphor
as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination
to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports
of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there
were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right
and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry
aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated
efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality,
poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often
illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers;
far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came
with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought sex. Much was mixed up in this
movement  decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult 
but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way
are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young
today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking
to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel
or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has
a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters
that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism
was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful
and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt
summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed
matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The
contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by
Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists
and hermeneutics. Current theories
on metaphor and brain
functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between
impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts?
Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private
thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist
intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought
to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was
rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme
and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of
past associations (Modernism), of non-visual
associations (Imagism), of histories of usage
(Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism).
By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration
of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac
of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left
for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest.

Symbolism
in Literature: France

Where Baudelaire felt life grievously, and developed a style to express
that experience, Mallarmé started
with words and turned them into beautiful creations that evaded the exterior
world. What mattered in Symbolism was the coherence of that inner vision,
and the sheer beauty of the verse.

Could
the
exterior
world
be
evaded
altogether,
when
poetry
would
refer
to
nothing
but
its
own
abstractions,
and
so
aspire
to
music,
the
most
creative
of
the
arts?
That
hope
came
from
Edgar
Allan
Poe,
but
was
taken
up
most
enthusiastically
by
French
poets,
who
strove
for
a
poésie
pure
of
unclouded
lyric
intensity.
Ideas
of
the
workaday
world,
its
decencies,
passions,
or
rationale,
were
unwanted,
indeed
were
detrimental.
Only
two
things
counted.
There
was
the
language
itself:
the
phonetic
properties
of
words,
their
connotations,
sounds,
half-heard
melodies,
etymologies,
etc.
And
there
were
symbols:
the
fire,
heaven,
ice,
lilies,
soul,
etc.
that
each
poet
explored
and
developed.
The
symbols
were
not
arbitrary,
and
were
more
discovered
than
created
by
the
poet.

How discovered? There were many views, each spawning a line of poetic development.
Some poets regarded symbols as corresponding to an ultimate reality (Baudelaire)
or to supernal beauty (Poe). That was the Neoplatonist tradition, which
sees poetry as transcending the world of appearances and apprehending divine
truth itself. Plato
had used myths, images and symbols to express his ideas, and the Neoplatonists
added a good deal of their own, from Roman Egypt and middle eastern mythology,
alchemy and astrology. The result could be baffling to the uninitiated,
but by using these symbols poets were tapping into what we now call archetypes,
and emphasizing the metaphoric nature of language.

All this was far from apparent at the time, and many poets discounted a
universe of pure forms existing as the primary heritage of mankind. Nonetheless,
poetic language might still be the royal road to understanding, or the medium
in which understanding revealed itself, for certainly the society around
them provided no such help. The commercial world was crassly materialistic,
for all its philanthropy and belief in progress. From such isolation, it
was only a short step to the New
Criticism doctrine, that a poem is an autonomous object complexly mediated
by language, i.e. the poem may or may not refer to real things, but exists
only in the form in which it presents itself.

Others were unwilling to grant this exclusive prestige to language. Each
art form offered its own vision, as did the compelling power of love or
religious experience.
In the hermetic tradition, moreover, understanding could not be earned without
effort and pain, so that a facile juggling with words would never answer
as poetry. Even Wittgenstein
believed that philosophy had to be undertaken with the whole being, and
not as an intellectual pursuit, and poets faced an equally arduous apprenticeship.
Openness to experience was essential, and that experience extended beyond
conventional beliefs and behaviour. Yeats and the Italian ermetismo movement
were much exercised by magic, and indeed by all those abstruse aspects of
learning hidden from the profane majority, an attitude that transferred
itself to Modernism.

A few travelled beyond poetry. Valéry became more absorbed in the processes
of writing than in the final product, magnificent though that often was.
Rimbaud deranged his senses
to create a startling poetry without verse, or what most would call verse.
His work rose with intense feelings from childhood memories into a sort
of muscular lyricism, which was uncompromisingly direct. It was certainly
poetry, but one without literary precedents  or descendants, since
nothing like it has been written since. Genius is the only explanation,
but genius that relied on drugs and alcohol. 'Then I would explain my
magic sophistries with the hallucination of words,' said their author.
Words were the only truth, as the academic Hegel had insisted, but not words
of some tidy philosophical system. The irrational gave access to a larger
and more liberated world, and from this belief developed Dadaism and Surrealism.

The vast majority of poets, however, saw the matter quite differently. Though
impressed by the purity of style, and the originator's obvious integrity,
they felt that Mallarmé's approach was wrong-headed. Impressions, feelings
and thoughts gave any art its first prompting, and these were then developed
in whatever form was appropriate. Technique is therefore what most contemporaries
learned from Symbolism: the exquisite musicality
without the philosophy.

Symbolism
in Literature: Spain

Symbolism was to take on board a good deal of twentieth century concerns
 alienation, loss of communal and spiritual beliefs  but this
freight is more obvious with hindsight. Poetry in the Romance languages
was initially rather straightforward. In Spanish, Symbolism was only one
of many elements introduced by Rubén
Darío, the great innovator, who was born in 1867 in Nicaragua, then
a remote country of jungles, lakes and volcanoes where the Spanish were
never fully at home. Childhood was predictably unhappy, but also productive.
As a child prodigy, Darío went to Managua and San Salvador, and then won
great praise for his first serious collection of poems and stories, Azúl,
published in 1888. Thereafter, as diplomat, traveller and essayist, he met
the most important writers of his day, and was able to fuse traditional
Spanish forms with Parnassian and Symbolist elements to produce what he
called modernismo. Darío was the most influential Spanish poet of
his time, and many still feel that Spanish literature was reborn under his
direction.

Darío himself was complex: religious, dissolute, solitary, childlike and
cynical. The poetry was equally bewildering, but always accomplished. The
most demanding forms were handled with effortless facility, complexities
of his own being added that defy translation  dissonance, assonance,
internal rhyme, borrowed mannerisms, an exuberance of language that could
be deftly erotic but also strikingly fresh and direct. He married three
times, returned to Nicaragua in 1906, and produced collections regularly
until his death from drink in 1916.

Darío had numerous followers but no real descendants. It was not the formidable
technical mastery  which may explain why he is so rarely translated
into English  but the eclectic and rootless nature of the achievement.
The poems work in and with a style that is distinctive, but do not speak
of a larger world which exists independently of their author. Lorca identified
with an Andalucian gypsy culture, and Neruda's communist history
of Latin America continues to resonate throughout the continent. Darío 's
world is more self-created: take away the astonishing artistry and only
the props of poetry remain: swans, centaurs, stars, etc. To a Left wing
readership, Darío 's poetry may appear bombastic and over-decorative,
perhaps like Swinburne to English readers. But to Spaniards in the
first decades of the twentieth century, particularly those stifled by the
conservative attitudes of provincial Spain, Darío's poetry came as liberation.
With the measures he introduced, poetry could accomplish anything.

What measures? Take a simple poem of Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958). No
Era Nadie in Jardines lejanos (1904) opens:  No era
nadie. El agua  Nadie? / Que no es nadie el agua?  No
/ hay nadie. Es la flor.  No hay nadie? / Pero no Es nadie la flor?
What does it mean? Not very much at first blush. It was no one. Water.
No one. / Is the water no one? There / is no one. It is the flower. There
is no one / But is the flower no one? But this is not mindless riddling:
the rhythmical effects create colour and music. More importantly, they cause
us to look at the world afresh. Edmund
Husserl stressed the contents of consciousness, and here, quite independently,
was one way of bracketing off experience from traditional or mundane concerns.

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1899-1936) went further to introduce Surrealist
elements. The opening lines of Romance Sonambulo (Romancero gitano,
1928) run: Verde que te queiro verde. / Verde viento. Verde ramas.
A literal translation conveys very little: Green, I want/love you green.
Green wind. Green branches. But the Spanish ear surrenders to the incantation,
entranced by the repetition of vowels and the v, r and que
sounds. Green evokes leaves and water, moreover, if somewhat garishly
in this nightmare setting of a very Spanish story of blood and honour, and
that association is important. Trees at night only show their true colour
when illuminated, and this mysterious green of the wind and branches utters
a warning: the scenes depicted are not real and should not be happening.
Later in the poem, when the dead girl is discovered floating in the pool,
the greenness is given a sharper twist: Verde carne, pelo Verde / con
ojos de fría plata Green flesh, green hair / with eyes of chilly silver.
A simple device, but one permeating and giving depth to the poem.

What is the point of creating such an unreal world? The freedom to explore
issues that were difficult or forbidden  in Lorca's case, his
homosexuality and Republican sympathies. Lorca was also markedly self-aggrandizing,
so that the poetry was one way of ensuring that the artist remained spot-lit
on his rostrum. No doubt the two went together, the Symbolist legacy being
developed as much for personal needs as other considerations.

Symbolism
in Literature: Germany

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 of German parents in Prague. He was
dressed as a girl by his mother and sent to a military academy by his father,
and from these confusions and resentments developed a character that became
increasingly fastidious, hypersensitive and retiring. Rilke found solace
in his own thoughts, but the resulting restrictions and inner discipline
that eventually made him one of the greatest of European lyric poets came
through a personal reworking of Nietzschean philosophy.

Rilke advanced rapidly. His early work was facile and openly sentimental,
winning a wide readership but not critical acclaim. Thereafter he acquired
the virtuosos handling of words from the Symbolist poet Stephan George,
and from the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen learned to find sensuous
equivalents in nature for personal feelings that were vague and unformed.
The experiences of two visits to Russia in the company of Nietzsche's friend
Lou Andreas-Salomé were profoundly moving, and from them he developed a
sense of the brotherhood between men and inanimate objects. In April 1901
Rilke married the artist Clara Westhoff, but could not support the family,
and left after 18 months to pursue a life free of commitments. In Paris
he acted as unpaid secretary to Rodin, and was brought to see that an artist
cannot rely on inspiration but must work continually to realize his skills
and his sensations before nature. The influence of Russia appeared in the
collection the Book of Hours (1905), and of Rodin in New Poems
(1907-8). The short novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(1910) was something of a retreat  it records a sensitive poet recoiling
from (and developing inner resources to meet) the loneliness and poverty
of Paris life  and the next years were passed in travel to Spain and
North Africa, and in translating French, Italian and English poetry into
German. In staying at the Schloss Duino in 1912, however, Rilke was overwhelmed
by a flood of inspiration, composing the first of what would be published
as the Duino Elegies in 1923. With their eventual completion came
a sonnet cycle, Sonnets to Orpheus, and then occasional poems in
simpler forms until Rilke's death from leukemia in 1926.

By his early thirties, Rilke had acquired a virtuosity
to turn anything to poetry, and no translations adequately express the beauty
of work in The Book of Hours or New Poems. But it was the
Duino Elegies that opened up new realms for European poetry. The
Symbolist movement gave Rilke a language for the as-yet unsayable, and his
verse mastery shaped it to a persuasive view. Nonetheless, Rilke's thought
is not orthodox, and its pantheism, mysticism and seeking after God may
only appeal to those who experience Rilke's own marginal sense of existence.
Lines like wenn der Wind voller Weltraum / uns am Angesicht zehrt
(when the wind-fuller space erodes our faces) may be wonderfully apt to
those oppressed by the insubstantiality and brevity of human existence,
but enigmatic to most. Likewise the rarefied music of the late verse: it
adumbrates what sometimes seems close to abstruse nonsense.

Critics often admire the poetry while rejecting the thought, raising the
problem of truth in poetry. Rilke very much believed in what he wrote, and
his poetry was a way of divining what he did indeed think and feel. His
technical mastery was such that he did not betray beliefs for the felicitous
phrase, but could oblige the German language to say beautifully what it
had not said before. "The essential function of art is to think and feel
existence to that conclusion which convinces us of its perfection 
to affirm, bless and deify existence." The words are Nietzsche's, but express
the aims of much of Rilke's poetry.

It is an odd objective. Nietzsche
hated the restrictions of bourgeois German society, and imagined a Greek
aristocracy in the sunburnt splendour of its powers. Yet there is something
suspect about this view, just as there is in Lorca's gypsies or Neruda's
communism. Greece is the foundation of European civilization, but many aspects
would be repellent today: slavery, phallic cults, treatment of women, great
savagery in war. The German Professor of Philology, sedentary and riddled
with syphilis, would not have been at home in Periclean Athens, let alone
pre-Socratic Greece. Rilke is an even less heroic figure, and was concerned
with refining emotions that would have speedily undone the common purpose
of Greek city life. Yet the spiritual sickness of the age, which so many
nineteenth century artists complained of, and attempted to overcome through
their work, was what Modernism would explore and take develop from.

The Duino Elegies

Below is the First of the Duino Elegies, the opening 26 lines of this famous
94-line section.

Who, if I cried, could hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them impulsively
took me to his heart, I should perish
in his stronger existence. For the beautiful is nothing
but the feared beginning of what we at length endure
and that which we admire is its calm disdain
to destroy us. Each and every angel is fearful,

And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note
of the dark sobbing. Ah, who is there that we are able
to make use of? Not angels, not men,
and even the sensing animals know
that we are not securely at home
in our interpreted world. There remains to us perhaps
some tree or other on the hillside to be daily
met with again; there is yesterday's street
and the spoilt devotion of a habit
that liked us and stayed and never gave notice.

Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind-fuller space
erodes our faces  for whom would she not remain, the yearned for,
the gently disappointing one, whom the single heart
arduously is approaching? Is she the truth for lovers?
Alas, they only obscure in each other their destiny.

Don't you know that yet? Fling out of your arms the emptiness;
add it to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds
will feel the enlarged air with more ardent flight.

(trans. C. John Holcombe)

Symbolism
in Literature: America

Even the New York Times seemed nonplussed. Wallace Stevens,
Noted Poet, Dead, the obituary began. Yes, noted by connoisseurs of
Modernist poetry, but never a well-known figure, nor one assiduous of reputation.
The thoughts and imagery were foreign, French very probably, and the tone
was detached and often cerebral. For all their gaudy celebration of the
senses, the poems fought shy of actually saying anything, just as Wallace
Stevens himself was cautious of bohemian impropriety. He was a respected
officer of a large insurance company who happened to write poetry 
very accomplished poetry, but poetry devoid of passion, biography or social
comment. Even now, after the excesses of speculative literary theory, to
which poetry so empty of obvious content proved irresistible, the question
remains: what does the poetry signify?

Wallace Stevens was born in 1879 in comfortable circumstances, became president
of the Harvard literary magazine, tried his hand at journalism for nine
months in New York, but then opted for the safety of a dull aspect of the
legal profession. He married his long-suffering sweetheart in 1909, delayed
having a child for fifteen years, and finally left New York in 1919 with
the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he reached the position
of vice-president in 1934. But for odd trips to collect the honours that
accumulated in the last years, Stevens stayed in Hartford for the remainder
of his life as a safe company man.

Stevens was in his late twenties when he started writing modernist poetry,
and forty-four when his first book, Harmonium (1923), was published.
Thereafter, the volumes appeared with increasing if not pressing frequency:
A Primitive Like an Orb (1948), Transport to Summer (1949),
The Auroras of Autumn (1950), The Collected Poems (1950) and
Opus Posthumous (1957). The subjects developed variously, but the
themes did not fundamentally change. Harmonium is the most original
collection, and contains many of his most anthologized poems  The
Emperor of Ice Cream, Sunday Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Anecdote
of the Jar, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Sunday Morning
was an impressively sustained hedonistic reverie, but the others 
were they anything but elaborate entertainments in poetic skill? The New
York Times critic couldn't believe so: "From one end of the book to the
other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not
one word that can arouse emotions. The volume is a glittering edifice of
icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead." That was overstating
matters, but the criticism was just, from a certain point of view.

But Stevens was not writing in the old tradition. As the critic had shrewdly
realized, Stevens was creating something exotic: a poesie pure, a
Symbolist poetry without the usual symbols, a poetry indeed where rhythms,
vowels and consonants substituted for musical notes. And that, for the good
Percy Hutchinson, was simply not enough. "Poetry," he wrote "is founded
in ideas; to be effective and lasting, poetry must be based on life, it
must touch and vitalize emotion."

But Stevens' ideas did affect the mind, at least his own mind, and he went
on developing his themes at great length. True, some of the more enigmatic
lines: The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to
feel that one's desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair. would
have exasperated the moral philosopher. (How are desire and despair being
used in this instance, and what is the situation they are describing?) Stevens
provides information on neither, which raises spectres of intellectual frivolity,
of playing fast and loose with concepts. Poetry is not philosophy, but are
his poems  except perhaps Sunday Morning  in any way
what even Postmodernists call an experience? Perhaps Stevens did see things
more intensely than most. Perhaps his reality was crucially that of the
imagination. Perhaps the Symbolism he espoused was too rarefied an import
for isolationist America, and one that needed café society to thrive. Whatever.
Stevens made few converts and founded no movements.

Recognition came belatedly. To the narrower strains of New
Criticism, however, his work was living proof that poetry is composed
of words used in new and subtle relationships. Postmodernists
in their turn found his work a paradigm of true poetry, of artwork entirely
sealed from reference to the outside world. Academia found him useful teaching
material: students most certainly had to work hard at his poetry: the content
was rarefied, the diction unexpected, and the allusions obscure indeed.

The general public was less enthusiastic. Some poems were as fresh and
playful as Edith Sitwell's.

Chieftan Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
(Bantans in Pine Woods)

Others could be tiresomely clever:

The prince of proverbs of pure poetry,
(Esthètique du Mal)

And much was simply baffling. What, exactly, did this mean:

Call him the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds
(The Emperor of Ice-Cream)

Or:

We make, although inside an egg
Variations on the words spread sail.
(Things of August)

Was Stevens truly a Symbolist? Certainly he wrote in an allusive, enigmatic,
and musical style. He developed the art of suggestion, and employed rare
words, private associations and syntactical intricacies. But Symbolism attempted
to extend the evocative power of words to express feeling, sensations and
states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. Scattered jottings suggest
that Stevens did indeed identify with these aims, and he certainly read
Bergson, Santayana and contemporary art magazines. His later work in fact
attempts a more public role, which is rather what Symbolism was designed
not to do. Of the great mass of people he wrote The men have no shadows
/ And the women have only one side. The note is elegiac, but perhaps
a little patronising in:

...that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate with life
That is sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze

Below is a stanza of Wallace Stevens's celebrated Sunday Morning.
The poem has a Keatsian-like dwelling on sensation  though not the
sustained hush of a too-obvious craftsmanship  but is interesting
for another reason. Keats was certainly aware that brevity gives relish
to life, but he would not have said Death is the mother of beauty.
Keats was a Romantic, a child of his time, and those times embraced political
change. He was not the sickly idealist sometimes envisaged, but a practical
man brought up against the realities of life by his medical training. Dreams
and imagination may have been the raw materials of art, but Keats gives
them the warmth and individuality that Stevens does not usually attempt.
Perhaps only this beautiful poem  of which copyright restrictions
allow us to quote only a stanza  shows what Stevens might have written
if he not been a Modernist and a cautious man.

Stanza V of Sunday Morning

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our path,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willows shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Though still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who can thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit, what struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal  yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah happy, happy boughs that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu,
Ah, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little river by town or sea-shore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape, Fair attitude!
With brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought;
With forest branches and trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou halt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'  that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Sunday Morning concerns itself with the impermanence of sensuous
happiness, and somewhat contrasts the Christian with Greek views of life.
The first sees our life on the earth as a preparation for the next. The
second regards present existence as the all important, and one that should
be lived to the full. What is meant by Death is the mother of beauty?
Sensuous matter has beauty because it or we have no extended existence:
we prize it more because it is so fleeting? That beauty is conferred on
objects by considerations that lie beyond the veil of Death, i.e. Platonic
Ideas? Both can be read into the poem, but may only make sense when we realize
that Sunday Morning is modelled on George Santayana's philosophy,
{23} notably his Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900) {24}
Even the stanzas broadly follow the chapters in Santayana's book: stanza
I relates to chapter 1, II to 2, III to 3, IV to 4, V to 5, VI to 6, VII
to 7 and 8, and VIII to chapters 9 and 10. In our stanza V, the speaker
is looking beyond the permanent but cold Platonic Idea to reunion after
death  or possibly so, as the stanza returns to the attractions of
the present.

I have only touched on Sidney Fleshback's article, which draws together
themes of death in other poems by Stevens, notes the attitudes of Whitman,
Browning, and Emerson in the poem, and discusses the conflicting images
and their possibly satiric intent. But one point is worth stressing. Wallace
Stevens wrote his most beautiful, if to my mind only partly successful,
poem when he stopped chasing his own evanescent musings and reworked the
established themes of European civilization. Sidney Fleshback calls Stevens'
handling of the themes idiosyncratic, but a blunter term might be muddled.
While we stay on the surface of the poem we can admire its treatment of
the numinous quality of sensuous life, its underlying mysteries and unfathomable
nature. Look deeper, and we begin to wonder whether the poet was not simply
toying with concepts and intellectual possibilities: excellent material
for academic studies but baffling to the common reader. Symbols  the
hermetic with Mallarmé, jewelled with Darío, portentous with Rilke and obscure
in much of Stevens's work  do not succeed unless they call on the
great commonplaces of life. Poetry may or may not create ideas, but it must
give them contemporary identity, a local habitation and a name.

A much fuller account of Wallace Stevens' work and influence can be found on Ocaso Press.